Racial Leftism is the metier of useless people. Either the totally unskilled and worthless at the bottom end, or the elites who have been highly educated – usually in totally worthless subjects – but exist in a world where they broker power.
The people who work for a living in the skilled trades or practical fields are generally more conservative.
I’ve met very few non-Conservative petroleum engineers or welders. Environmental engineers tend Left. Pediatricians are Leftists, orthopedic and cardiac surgeons are Conservatives. The more you work with your hands doing a skill, the more on the Right you tend to be, because the more you see directly how your income is tied to the value of what you produce.
Now we get to Portland.
https://twitter.com/Jayparasco/status/1392900712128946179
The “Thin Blue Line” is not a white supremacist symbol. The Left thinks so because they think the police are white supremacists and therefore support of the police is white supremacism.
Enter one of the worst elected officials ever in the history of America.
My office and PBOT are aware that the “thin blue line” flag is being displayed by a City contractor doing work for PBOT. Full statement below. pic.twitter.com/6WLyMOkhl4
— Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty (@JoAnnPDX) May 27, 2021
The Statement:
A PBOT (Portland Bureau of Transportation) contractor cannot show support for the Portland Police on their truck without a city government official trying to cancel their contract.
I hope every contractor in Portland sees this and understands how much the city government hates tehm.
There is a building boom throughout Red states. They should go there and jump on the gravy train.
Leave Portland and its infrastructure to crumble into dust.
“This incident also highlights the lack of diversity among City contractors…”
Reminds me of the spate of “Women Owned” or “Minority Owned” preferences for government contracts awhile ago (probably still going on, but I got out of the government contracting racket years ago). Many small companies were put in the wife’s name and continued business as usual. Others were startups by women or minorities who were totally incompetent, but met the preference criteria to get the contract and of course later, a competent contractor was brought (often on the QT) in to finish the job, or correct the screw-up done by the preferenced contractor. Your tax dollars at work.
I work in IT (information technology) and I’ve noticed the same sort of trend. Not along the lines of working with your hands; more like, whether the goals of your work are constrained by reality.
Basically, the more you have to operate in — or bounded by — facts and hard truths, the more conservative you tend to be. The more you can focus on how things should be over how things are, the more people trend left.
IOW, workers with hard constraints (deadlines, budgets, hardware limitations, etc.) trend right, workers without such constraints trend left.
That delineation works with the examples you listed, too. Cardiac and orthopedic surgeons have hard limits and goals, and trend right; pediatricians have fewer hard limits and more open-ended goals, and trend left. Ditto for petroleum and materials engineers versus environmental engineers, respectively.
Coming around to Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, she spent her young life impoverished and surrounded by drugs and crime (and mostly black people doing it), and now wants to end all that “inequity”. And as commissioner, she has few constraints on her actions; she can vote whichever way she wants, and it’s someone else’s job to figure out how to make it happen. Combine loose and lofty goals with almost no constraints, and of course she trends left.
(Her “rags-to-riches black woman” story is one reason she’s such a darling to the media; most of the rest of the commission, including the mayor, are usually wealthy and white.)
I applaud the contractor for standing their ground, and wish them the best when their city contacts aren’t renewed for “reasons” when they are set to end.
Unfortunately, things like concrete and asphalt plants aren’t that portable; I’m guessing it would be cheaper for the contractor, if they chose to move, to simply sell or abandon-in-place their existing facilities than to attempt to relocate them. But I’d bet the owners are considering the tradeoffs, based on this interaction.
On the one hand, have to rebuild elsewhere. On the other hand, a chance to modernize the plant in a place that would like some heavy infrastructure-type industry around…?
Oh, Hardesty. She’s one of the “usual suspect” characters who keeps popping up. Not surprised at all.
The women and minorities owned preferences are still there in a lot of large corporations. Put the wife or daughter in as President and CEO; while the guy that runs it is the COO or Manager. Ideally, put several different preferred people on the corporate masthead.
If you ever do contracting, there is always enough correspondence, accounting, and paperwork to keep someone busy, no matter what their gender, race, or sexual preference.
Maybe OCS should consider spinning off a new subsidiary just for government contracts? A subsidiary with all the proper preferred people in the foreground?
LOL, now I see that twerp has “petulant busybody who targets working-class people” as his account description. Wonder if that was before this incident.
It’s also pretty amusing how many folks responding think the commercial USDOT registration ID means this is a US government vehicle. What idiots.
She gave them a gift. When they don’t get the contract next year, the company can sue while producing her statement that it was due to them exercising protected speech.
You’d think liberals would be happy that a company was proudly displaying their support for the badge wearing branch of Portland Antifa.